Thursday, September 15, 2005

Let's Get Ready to Rumble

I keep managing to forget that I'm going to be in Vegas October 6th-October 9th, staying at the MGM Grand, watching the Texas-OU game on Saturday, followed shortly thereafter by seeing the Corrales-Castillo rematch live, in da flesh. Which is a nice thing to suddenly remember, over and over.

I'm ready for the poker script of the week to flip the page, as yesterday was yet another rendition of the Stuck-Unstuck Revue. I think I ended up about $18 to the good, after being down $1,200 or so and looking for some small dogs or children to kick. It's a bit odd, as I'm not even having big hands cracked, or getting out of line when I shouldn't be, or any of that jazz.

One thing I'm working on, which sounds silly, is increasingly my willingness to look stupid. Both at the poker table and away from it. I don't think the S&M Boys address that directly in any of their 2+2 books, but at a certain point the willingness to occasionally look stupid can definitely be an asset, at the poker table. It definitely applies more to tournament situations, where you push with complete junk, attempting to steal, but it spills over to limit as well. You obviously don't want to make a habit of bluff raising/re-raising on scary boards, but you also shouldn't avoid that if you're only worry is that they'll look you up and you'll appear to be an idiot. Issues of table image aside, you're likely not playing optimally if you don't make a move or two per session that, in hindsight, looks pretty stupid when someone calls your bluff.

Lately I've been pretty obsessed with sports arbitrage betting, which is a pretty interesting world. Don't get me wrong, manually pouring through sportsbooks looking for arbitrage situations is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but the sportsbetting market is most definitely an inefficient one, especially when you throw in bonus money for new accounts/reloads. It also makes me giggle to have $500 riding on Victor Hanescu at the BCR open in Romania, or $750 on the Saskatchewan Roughriders money line. (In reality, it's a risk-free wager, so there's really nothing at risk, it just strikes me as funny, as far as betting big on obscure events.)

2 comments:

Staying at MGM - nice. I'd love a report on how the hotel is (staying there) when you get back :) I'm heading to Vegas at the end of October, but staying downtown to save some cash... though I plan on spending many hours in MGM's poker room!